By Sulome Anderson

The nail salon in the picturesque village of Ras Baalbek looks like any other nail salon in Lebanon. Located in the northeast of the country, close to the Syrian border, the predominantly Christian town is quiet today, drenched in June sunlight. A group of women chatter excitedly as they fan their freshly painted fingernails and examine their pedicures.

“You can't see that color on your nails,” a pretty girl in her 20s says to her middle-aged, heavyset aunt, who is drying her toes. “You should have picked a different color.”

Fulya Ozerkan and Emmanuelle Baillon, AFP

Gaziantep (Turkey) (AFP) - She wanted to move to a land where "the laws of Allah apply" but found herself trapped in a world of arbitrary beatings and violence where women are treated as sexual objects.

Nadia (not her real name), a 21-year-old French woman, was recruited earlier this spring by Islamic State (IS) jihadists on Internet chatrooms and then travelled to the militants' self-declared capital of Raqa, in Syria.

But she quickly grew disenchanted, finding the highly-radicalised militants "fantasise more about the Kalashnikov than the Koran".

During a tumultuous three months with IS in Raqa, she married and then separated from a jihadist, was twice thrown in jail and then managed to cross into Turkey where she was detained by police.

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